Imagine you’re sprinting through your inbox on the morning commute, squinting at your phone’s screen as you try to piece together the latest thread about the project deadline, the client’s feedback, and that last-minute change request from your manager. Cue Gmail’s new magic trick: AI-powered summaries that pop up above the thread without you ever having to ask for one.
It’s been nearly a year since Google Workspace users first got their hands on Gemini-powered email summaries—but back then, you had to tap “Summarize this email” at the top of a message to summon the AI genie. Starting May 29th, Gmail will proactively decide when a conversation has grown unruly enough that a quick digest could save your sanity—and your thumb from endless scrolling.
These auto-summaries aren’t reserved for every single email. Google’s models look for “longer email threads or messages with several replies,” deploying summaries judiciously when they think you need them most. And because these threads tend to evolve—new replies, fresh insights, urgent clarifications—Gmail keeps its summaries in sync, updating them in real-time as people chime back in.

Right now, the feature is rolling out exclusively on mobile devices for English-language emails in paid Workspace tiers (think Business Starter, Enterprise, and Google One AI Premium). Don’t panic if you don’t see it yet: Google warns it could take up to two weeks to hit your account. There’s no word yet on when—or if—the same AI smarts will make their way to the desktop Gmail experience, or to free personal accounts.
Google’s Gemini AI has been steadily planted across Workspace apps, from Docs to Sheets to Chat, with mixed results. In a recent hands-on, IT Pro found that while Gemini excelled at drafting and styling text in Docs, it could be “flawed but fast” when crunching complex data in Sheets—or hallucinate details in its responses. In Gmail, however, the assistant’s summarization chops have proven the most reliable, nailing the core of a thread without inventing phantom facts.
That reliability is critical: an errant AI summary in your inbox could lead to miscommunication, missed deadlines, or—worst of all—a “Reply All” disaster. By making summaries automatic, Google is betting that its AI models are mature enough to add genuine value, surfacing the most salient points of your conversations so you can decide, at a glance, whether to dive in or delegate.
If you’re still the kind of person who likes clicking buttons, fear not: you can still manually request summaries as before. Just tap “Summarize this email” in the Gemini sidebar. And for those of us who prefer a more minimalist inbox, Google gives you a kill switch, too. Head into Gmail’s settings, find Smart features and personalization, and flip off Smart features—which disables all AI-driven bells and whistles, not just summaries.
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